The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

by Brian Merchant

It has to be separated and refined from compounds, so it’s usually expensive to get. But here, the high concentration of lithium in the salar brines combined with the ultradry climate allows miners to harness good ...

And Atacama is absolutely loaded with lithium—Chile currently produces a full third of the world’s supply and holds a qua...

Lithium-ion batteries are the power source of choice for laptops, tablets, electric cars, and, of course, smartphones.

Lithium is increasingly described as “white petroleum” by those who recognize its key place in industry.

A battery is basically just three parts:

two electrodes (an anode with a negative charge and a cathode with a positive charge) and an electrolyte running between them.

In more than a century, the science hadn’t changed.” Which is a little shocking, because the battery remains one of the largest silent forces that shape our experiences with technology.

lithium is highly volatile and prone to generating lots of heat in a reaction.

The new, ultralight rechargeable lithium-ion battery fit the bill. It wouldn’t take long for the technology to spread from Sony’s early Handycams to cell phones to the rest of the consumer-electronics industry.

Fueled by Goodenough’s research and Sony’s product development, lithium batteries became a global industry unto themselves.

As of 2015, they made up a thirty-billion-dollar annual market.

And the trend is expected to continue, abetted by electric and hybrid vehicles. That massive, rapid-fire doubling of the market that occurred between 2015 and 2016 was primarily due to one major announcement: the opening of Tesla’s Gigafactory, which i...

SQM drills down into the brine as an oil company might drill for oil. At the Salar de Atacama, there are 319 wells pumping out 2,743 liters of that lithium-rich brine per second.

Also like an oil company, SQM is always drilling exploratory holes to locate new bounty.

The brine gets pumped into hundreds of massive evaporating ponds,

they concentrate the brine solution until it’s about 6 percent lithium.

This vast network of clear to blue to neon-green pools is only the first step in creating the lithium that ends up in your batteries. After it’s reduced to a concentrate, the lithium is shipped by tanker truck to a refinery

The refinery operation is an industrial winter wonderland. Salt crystals grow on the reactors, and lithium flakes fall like snow on my shoulders. That’s because 130 tons of lithium carbonate are whipped up here every day and shipped from Chile’s ports. That’s 48,000 tons of lithium a year.

much of the world’s battery power originates right here.

From here, the lithium will be shipped from a nearby port city to a battery manufacturer, probably in China. Like most of the component parts in the iPhone, the li-ion battery is manufactured overseas.

“The battery is the key to a lot of the psychology behind these devices,”

When the battery begins to drain too fast, people get frustrated with the whole device it powers. When the battery’s in good shape, so is the phone.

Influential as li-ion has been, Goodenough believes that a new and better battery—one whose key ingredient is sodium, not lithium—is on the horizon.

Sodium is heavier and more volatile than lithium, but cheaper and more easily accessible.

There’s a nonzero chance that your future iPhone battery will be powered by salt.

Batteries are going to keep improving. Not just for the benefit of iPhone consumers, obviously, but for the sake of a world that’s perched on the precipice of catastrophic climate change.

The lithium-ion battery—conceived in an Exxon lab, built into a game-changer by an industry lifer, turned into a mainstream commercial product by a Japanese camera maker, and manufactured with ingredients dredged up in the driest, hottest place on Earth—is the unheralded engine driving our future machines.

Instagram is of course one of the iPhone’s most popular and important apps. Mashable, a website obsessed with digital culture, ranks it as the iPhone’s number-one app, bar none.

It would take the iPhone’s growing user base—and photocentric apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic—to demonstrate to Apple the potential of the phone’s camera.

Today, as the smartphone market has tightened into an arms race for features, the camera has become immensely important, and immensely complex.

“There’s over two hundred separate individual parts” in the iPh...

It’s not merely a matter of better lenses. Far from it—it’s about the sensors and software around them.

But the hardest part of the process wasn’t the engineering—it was the politics.

Building the demo meant messing with how other parts of the computer worked—and that meant messing with other teams’ stuff.

Once Steve blesses something, no one’s going to stand in the way.

If you ever wanted to get something done, you just say, ‘Oh, well, Steve wants to do this’ and you had carte blanche, because no one was going to check with Steve to see if [he] actually said that, and no one was going to question you. So if you really wanted to win an argument in a meeting, you’d just go, ‘Steve!’

The CMOS, meanwhile, is in the iPhone and has beaten out the CCD as the go-to technology for phone cameras today.

You can’t talk about iPhone cameras without talking about selfies.

Apple placed the FaceTime camera on the front side of the phone, pointed toward the user, to enable the feature,

which had the added effect of making it well-designed for taking selfies.

selfies really exploded with the iPhone, which, with the addition of the FaceTime cam in 2010, gave people, for better or worse, an easy way to snap photos of themselves and then filter the results.

Before 2007, we expected to pay hundreds of dollars if we wanted to take solid digital photos. We brought digital cameras on trips, to events; we didn’t expect to bring them everywhere.

Today, smartphone camera quality is close enough to the digital point-and-clicks that the iPhone is destroying large swaths of the industry.

in a small twist of irony, Apple is using technology that those companies pioneered i...

One of the features that routinely gets top billing in Apple’s ever improvin...

optical image stabi...

It’s a key component; without it, the ultralight iPhone, influenced by every tiny movement of your hands, would p...

eliminate blur by measuring the rotation angle of a camera with a vibrating gyro, and then correct the image accordingly.

innovation is the act of creating new networks between ideas—or new routes through old networks.

“Inspiration is, in my understanding, a phenomenon in which one idea in the brain is stimulated to be unexpectedly associated with, and linked to, a totally different idea.”